Naturally there are a lot of things that happen that we just don't expect. This trope is when you just don't expect a game to be Nintendo Hard. You'd expect a shooter with robots spraying machine gun fire to be difficult, but a game with fairies shooting spells at you from their wands can still hand your ass to you.

Difficult games can be anywhere, in any genre. Of course this is YMMV, but the fact of the matter is that difficult games don't exactly have any kind of official way to mark themselves, so they can show up when we least expect them. As these examples show, woe betide those who judge a game by surface "cuteness".

When occurring in licensed games based on children's series, chances are that you expected the Animation Age Ghetto to be applied to them. Often goes hand-in-hand with Art-Style Dissonance, as people often expect a "cute" game to be non-challenging, both in mechanics and in plot. Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay is also related, as part of the difficulty may stem from the fact that the game avoids certain conventional simplifications and shortcuts found in other games of the same genre that players have come to expect by default. Also another reason American Kirby is Hardcore.

Examples:

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Shoot Em Up

The "Cute 'em Up" sub-genre, a variation of the Shoot Em Ups and Bullet Hell genres, with everything replaced with cute cartoon creatures, like bunnies, penguins, and kitties. Rarely localized outside of Japan, and then usually just in PAL regions, those unfamiliar with these games may think these games would be easy or even "kiddie". Don't do that!

Touhou Project might very well be the most well known example. Fans know what to expect. Those who aren't go in for the loads of cute little girls in frilly dresses living in a cheerful fairy land, only to find out at about level 2 or 3 that these little girls love shooting enough ordnance to carpet bomb the entire United States. And Touhou is actually not particularly hard compared to other games that would fit this entry.

The Pocky And Rocky series, a game where the eponymous characters are a ChibiMiko and a raccoon dog, is one of the few to be localized in North America.

The Parodius is a light-hearted, colorful take on Konami's other shoot-em-up mainstay Gradius - and is just as Nintendo Hard.

And 'Otomedius. First stage, easy. Second stage, not too painful. Third and fourth stages, painful. The remaining stages will tear your lungs out.

Everyday Shooter is a cool-looking little indie game. Despite its simple graphics, the game is much harder than it looks.

Similar to the Audiosurf example below, Space Invaders Infinity Gene can generate different stages based on whatever song you selected for your iPhone, leading to stages that are easier or harder than they look.

Play modern Bullet Hell games for long enough and you'll be in for a shock when you play older, "classical" Shoot 'em Up games. Fans who are used to Bullet Hell may attempt older shmups, expecting the difficulty to be cakewalk due to the lower bullet count, only to get sniped in the ship-sizedhitbox by fast bullets into a quick Game Over; Raiden is notorious for "sniper" enemies that can kill the player with almost no advance warning. Labyrinthine level designs with Deadly Walls, like those in R-Type can also be very difficult for players accustomed to the open, wall-less stages of most bullet hell games. Last but not least, many older shmups have Check Points rather than respawning in place, as well as depriving you of most or all of your powerups upon death; while dying in Touhou or other Bullet Hell games typically only results in a slight drop (if any) in power alongside the life loss and scoring enhancements (if you're playing for score), dying even once in Gradius, for example, means losing all of your remaining lives in the 30 seconds if you do not have the skill to pull through wherever you just died in spite of your total loss of powerups.

Platformer

Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams. It starts off as a simple cutesy platformer until a certain level where the game stops having mercy and forces the player to go through several segments full of spikes and devilish enemies specifically made to be only avoided with the Dual-World Gameplay mechanic while the player still has to be careful with spikes and other hazards.

Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. The series isn't known for easy games, but one theory has this game not released in the US at first because of its difficulty, more than it being a Mission-Pack Sequel. Please note that this is an NES game, so that difficulty is in comparison to the originalNintendo Hard games! At the beginning of the game there's an easy method to get over 100 lives. You will need them all.

Don't let the bright and colorful graphics, along with characters appealing to kids, fool you in Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario Sunshine. They have lots of surprise challenges/obstacles that throw off even the most hardened platform gamers. The most famous ones are the challenges presented by the green lumas in Galaxy and a few of the sub-levels in Delfino Plaza in Sunshine and of course the Fake Difficulty that is the Green Star hunt in Galaxy 2.

Nobody who hasn't played the game would suspect that this vocal-only version of the original SMB track is the one used on the most fiendishly evil levels of Sunshine. Even worse is that, unlike in most levels of the 3D Mario games, they're mandatory! Oh, and you have to do them twice each for 100%.

At least during the return attempts, you have FLUDD back. Part of the challenge comes from your first attempt being without that hovering ability you've probably been taking for granted up until now.

And you will need FLUDD's help for those return attempts, for the additional challenge is a collect-the-coin challenge, timed. And the timer isn't generous.

There's also the older Mario Games, which usually started off easy enough but got insanely difficult as you went along, though some people underestimate them (and the series as a whole) for being "kiddy".

That is provided World 7 doesn't destroy you first. Nine stages. Nine DIFFICULT stages, and two of the most devilishly evil fortresses in the game. World 7 has no breathers, it starts off tricky and only escalates from there.

For a person who had only played the somewhat offshoot-like Kirby 64, Nightmare in Dreamland lived up to its name, especially with how cheap the enemy respawns could be.

And Nightmare in Dreamland is actually easier than Kirby's Adventure, of which it is a remake.

Generally, the Kirby games were made to be accessible to anyone, including kids and newcomers to gaming. So they're usually rather easy if attempting a casual playthrough. Trying to go for 100% Completion, on the other hand...

Kirby's Epic Yarn deserves a special mention because you literally cannot die in the game, you only lose beads. The difficulty lies in collecting all the beads needed to get a gold medal or even progress to the next levels. Also the challenge levels can get fiendishly difficult.

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror is one of the few cases where just beating the main game is harder than the extra stuff, mainly due to starting out with a low amount of health, enemies being placed in extremely dickish locations, and losing your copy ability after one hit from anything.

Many Kirby games have a Boss Rush in them which can be horrible if you are not good with dodging the bosses attacks but that is nothing compared to the horror that is The True Arena appearing in games following Return To Dreamland. This is an even harder version of the first Boss Rush where the enemies have different, more powerful and harder to dodge attacks and finishes off with at least one Bonus Boss which likely comes up after you are completely drained.

Drill Dozer, in which the game stars an adorable little girl with a little adorable robot with drills for arms...but to get 100%, you have to beat levels with platforming so hard you will cry.

Dynamite Headdy is bright and cartoonish, but only a little harder than you might expect, until it ramps up significantly during and after the flying world. The Nasty Gatekeeper (following the much easier normal Gatekeeper) is pretty much the definition of Surprise Difficulty, with music to match.

That's the American/European version, by the way. The original Japanese version is still not easy, but the difficulty level is much more reasonable (and it gives you 3 continues by default).

The Japanese version has its own surprise difficulty (though technically more a Difficulty Spike) in the form of Twin Freaks. It's already considered to be one of the hardest bosses in the U.S/Euro game, and has twice as much health in this version, ignoring a certain glitch.

You wouldn't expect a game with cartoon-style graphics about a boy trying to rescue his dog from monsters to be anything other than an easy kids game, would you? Well, if that game is Heart of Darkness for the Playstation, prepare to be surprised. The game is a Platform Hell powered by Nightmare Fuel.

The Ecco the Dolphin series stars a dolphin as the player character. This dolphin will die, many, many times, be it via drowning, sharks, angry telepathic DNA, alien technology, or a particularly murderous edge of thescreen.

It also ramps up the difficulty for certain stages. When sharks were easily something you could dodge or fight, in "Open Ocean" they suddenly have a much more damaging attack and litter the entire screen. Near the end, scrolling stages occur. One being five minutes long. The Vortex Queen isn't easy either...and if you die or get eaten by the Vortex Queen? Back to the five minute long level. "Welcome To The Machine" will be burned into your retinas by the time you memorize it.

Tides of Time features the Skyway, a set of gorgeous mazes in water tubes high in the sky. Hope you like falling! Defender of the Future plays a loving homage to the Skyway with the Hanging Waters levels...breathtaking beauty and enraging difficulty and all.

Ecco was such a severe case of Surprise Difficulty that a kid-friendly spinoff Ecco Jr. was eventually released, as an apology of sorts to all the children who asked their parents for "the cute dolphin game" only get their asses utterly kicked by the sadistic difficulty of the main series.

The Croc games for the Playstation are more challenging than you'd think.

Mainly due to their camera angles and dodgy jumping. Oh and the enemies respawn a few seconds after you beat them.

The 1991 NES game of the same name would chew you up and spit you out. It doesn't help that, unless you have a heart in your inventory, everything kills you with one hit.

The sequel, Trouble in Wackyland is comparatively easier for the most part. It helps that that game has a three-heart health bar. However, while Plucky, Hamton, and Furrball's levels are fairly easy to get through, Babs' level, which involves an out-of-control roller coaster, requires a great amount of memorization of when to jump, duck, and flip the car to get through.

The first Game Boy game, Babs' Big Break, is comparatively simple while still having its tough moments, but the second, Montana's Movie Madness, while remaining easy enough for its first two stages, hits this trope hard in the third with a rocket ship-flying sequence that could give the ostrich ride in The Lion King a run for its money.

Scary Dreams/Buster's Bad Dream for the Game Boy Advance is a Beat 'em Up, and it's about as difficult as any other game in that genre, especially considering that while you do have unlimited continues, you have only one life. Thus, if you die, you start all the way back at the beginning of the stage.

The little-known Dreamcast game Super Magnetic Neo. It involves playing with a cutesy robot with magnetic powers having platforming adventures and taking on a bunch of cartoony villains led by a baby. Sounds simple enough, right? However, since it's inspired by the Crash Bandicoot games (the Naughty Dog games, mind you)...you better prepare to suffer.

The first few levels of Rayman are pretty easy. Then you reach Band Land and your whole world goes straight to hell. Suddenly the levels require dead-on precision and reflexes just to survive, Leaps of Faith to find MacGuffens required to advance the game, and those frigging grasshoppers. Even if you have 99 lives through cheats or some other method, expect to be down at least 25 by the time you finish.

The Klonoa games, even the GBA puzzle/platformers, start out incredibly easy and have a slow, gentle curve...until you reach the last couple of levels in each of them, at which point they become vicious one-way tickets to Platform Hell. And let's not even get to those crazy secret hidden levels...

Sonic Unleashed, especially the final zone, Eggmanland, seems to fall into this trope. Players tend to look at the ESRB rating (E10+) and assume, then are surprised when the game rips them a new one.

''Sonic the Hedgehog 4;': Part 1 is bizarrely difficult. The first level is not hard at all, but the remaining 3 are. Specifically there is a part of the Casino zone (casinos are usually breathers in Sonic games) where you have to jump across a set of moving cards that stay flat for a second then go vertical, so you fall to your death. The problem with this is that there are far too many of these and you'd have to have sheer luck in order to jump them all.

Umihara Kawase is a loveable platformer that was based on a surprisingly good physics engine (before Havok was even a concept) involving a rubber fishing line that functions like a Grappling-Hook Pistol. Up through Field 5, it's pretty straightforward. Field 6 ramps up the difficulty a bit. Pretty much any field thereafter skyrockets into completely bonkers levels of Nintendo Hard:

A level where you have to grapple across a ceiling to get to the exit...interspersed with patches of ceiling that your hook won't stick to? Check!

A boss fight in which you have to grapple your way under the stage to dodge him, then get back up before his tadpoles nibble you to death...five times (before he self-destructs, you can't hurt him)? Check!

Umihara Kawase is probably the only game in history to give the player 10 lives to start with and have it considered stingy.

And the ironic thing is that after you get past the learning curve, you realise that all those bits are the easy parts. Seriously. They're fun. It gets harder.

The end of Psychonauts. The very last section of the game has the difficulty curve surge upwards like crazy.

Here, have a rising lava level, jumping between awkward platforms with this game's finicky and awkward controls; a level style which had previously been avoided in the game. Surprise!

The cute looks of Gimmick (AKA Mr. Gimmick) for the NES will disguise its tricky enemy and level design. It is actually even worse due to your main weapon being pathetic, and the character having a VERY annoying inertia.

Toy Story. You'd expect something not too hard for a game based on a children's film. But the game takes Nintendo Hard to entirely new levels. Even with savestates, it's hard.

It wasn't that easy on the Gameboy either.

The Addams Family games for the SNES were just...insane. In the first like most platformers can give you a ridiculous number of lives if you know where to look. However it is probably the only game that expects you to use them. Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, completing a single area would take upwards of half an hour (if you knew where to go and how to progress through the levels), you were required to fight a difficult boss at the end of it (by which stage you'd be severely low on lives and energy), and then you got to do the whole thing again for the other eighteen million items you needed to collect. Oh, and did we mention that you can't save or in any way record your progress? Yeah. This from the TV show that gave us Lurch.

LittleBigPlanet. Awww, it's a cute little sackboy! Aww, look at him running around with his tongue out! Aww...wait, impact explosives? With jetpacks? And falling stalactites? This isn't cute, this is cruel! You want me to fight bosses now? There weren't any bosses before! And what's this about a Bunker?

The level with Goofy in the game Mickey's Ultimate Challenge. ESPECIALLY on the hardest level.

Blinx. Cutesy main character? Yep. Charming fantasy worlds to explore? Yep. Is this deceptive at all? YES. If some of the later levels weren't difficult enough, there's also the eighty hidden cat medals (some of which are deviously hidden) to collect, and the Nintendo Hard final boss, who is an absolute nightmare to defeat.

Donkey Kong Country Returns upholds the tradition. You have to wonder if the universe seems to really hate gorrilas after playing some of the temple levels.

Yoshi's Island DS. It's a sequel to one of the best loved platform games of all time...and brings back one of the nastier elements, it's insane secret level difficulty. World 1 to 3 are fairly easy. World 4 amplifies it. World 5 is a difficulty brick wall, with more spikes in the last two castles than probably the rest of the game proceeding it. Then you get the secret and extra levels. World 4's is doable. World 1 and 2's trap you and force Yoshi to die for every minor mistake, and have nigh on zero checkpoints. World 3 and 5's...are Platform Hell incarnate, and you'll need the huge lives stockpile you've collected after a few choice sections cost you fifty or so lives in quick succession.

The game that started it on the SNES isn't any different either. The game starts off very simple and the crayon styled graphics may lure players into thinking it's a game meant for babies, but around halfway through the game, the difficulty shoots up greatly as you have to deal with tricky gap crossing using a power up or Yoshi's floaty jump or trying to avoid nothing but spikes, which is instant death. Going for 100% Completion? The extra levels in each world will make you hurl your controller and swear at a game that just looks too damn cute to be swearing at.

Wario Land 4 and Shake It / Shake Dimension are colorful and have a silly atmosphere, but turn brutally difficult rather quickly. For the former, it's not the easier difficulties, those are incredibly nice to the player. But then you've got Super Hard mode. Yes, it's Harder Than Hard, but compared to the normal difficulty levels, is like going from Normal to Intense in Super Smash Bros.. Some levels like Pinball Zone and Arabian Night. for example, literally have next to no time for the level's length in question, and getting over 10,000 coins for 100% completion is nigh on impossible due to incredibly mean enemy placement and time limits. The first boss in the game has a time limit of 15 seconds, just to give you an idea. Shake It/ Shake Dimension just has the much more difficult than the rest of the series boss battles and the bonus challenges which make you survive Marathon Bosses as a semi one hit wonder.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is a fun little puzzle/platform hybrid that looks like your typical casual game at first glance, but the difficulty curve goes sharply up after the first world, with tricky platforming and tough bosses. The final world in particular contains some of the most challenging platformer gameplay out there, and beating the final boss is an achievement to brag about. And if you're playing Gentleman Mode, all bets are off.

Bart vs the Space Mutants for NES. Maybe nowadays you're not surprised it's Nintendo Hard since it's a primitive NES platformer, but back then you really expected at least some leniency out of a game based on The Simpsons. Nope, it's one of the hardest games on a platform famous for hard games.

Okay, even if I Wanna Be the Guy is never considered to be a game for kids, it still fits this trope at least because the difficulty may get really surprising at times, thanks to the fact that Everything Is Trying to Kill You. Even the things that are not obvious killers. Yet.IWBTG deserves some sort of prize in that, despite over-the-top ridiculous difficulty being the one thing the game is known for, it still manages to be surprisingly harder than whatever you were expecting when you started.

Crash Bandicoot. Specifically, the first one. It's ostensibly for kids and the other games in the series are very manageable...but not the first one. Even if you manage to get through 2-3 levels without running out of lives (you start with 4 every time you load) AND find all the "Tawna tokens" in the level, you only have one shot at a bonus level to even be able to save or find out your level password. The physics fall into Damn You, Muscle Memory, even (or especially) for people who have played the other games in the series. The lack of analog control also makes fine movement very, very difficult at times.

Collecting gems requires you to destroy every single destructible crate in the level. In the first game, some levels require you to fully explore two paths in order to do this. You won't know until you finish the level whether you missed any. Good luck. Oh, and you have to finish the entire level without dying.

Crash 2 is only more forgiving in that they removed the "finish the level without dying" gem condition. To make up for it, the developers kept everything in from the first one...and added more. Branching paths? Have fun exploring them in the dark, with bottomless pits everywhere! Secret levels? Be prepared to not only endure Platform Hell to get to them, but the levels themselves are brutal. Backtracking? Of course - and let's throw in a few levels where you not only have to backtrack, but you have to backtrack without dying. Have a Nice Death!

In the same vein as Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon series come in play. While the second installment of these series is comparatively easy (unless you go for Skill Points), the first and the third parts aren't actually to be beaten to 100% and higher status by children under 10. The starting moments may be easy (although some players may be gameovered in the first worlds), but sidequests and hidden walls/areas may become a pain in the ass (unless you know them all thoroughly). Several enemies may also become these, and again, their attacks are easy to avoid if you've played this game a lot before. But no matter how experienced may you be on these, there are also flights to be beaten...

Tomba!!/Tombi! for the PS1. You play as a pink haired dwarf who lives in a colorful world filled with psychotic pigs and carnivorous venus fly traps. Typically Japanese right? Well, it is in other aspects too -it often relies on timing to get somewhere without being killed, you need certain items (which you equip like an RPG), your life goes down very easily, and there are many occasions where the 2.5D of the game makes it look as if you can go somewhere you can't from that angle, leading to frustration.

Plok. You play as a sentient pile of clothing who could Rocket Punch, and the graphics were really cutesy. The titular character took very few hits to die, the enemies had Mercy Invincibility, and many of them were Kung Fu Proof Mooks. The bosses weren't exactly a walk in the park either (the first, a Dual Boss, was already quite tough). There were also quite a lot of traps and spikes in the game that were hard to traverse...

Claw is bright, colorful, undeniably charming, and fiendishly difficult even with the infinite-lives cheat enabled. In fact, using said cheat is pretty much mandatory if you want to have any hope of completing the game. The code is even listed in the manual, so the developers were probably self-aware.

The Lion King is based on a Disney movie; this'll be easy, right? Well, remember the "Just Can't Wait To Be King" scene from the movie, with Simba jumping from animal to animal? Yep, that's a level in the game. It's as hard as you'd imagine. And it's level 2. They get much worse from there. The following level contains 15-20 enemies that in many games would be mini-boss fights. And you can't save.

"You'd probably expect this game to be easy since it's a game for little girls. (Looks nervously at his lives counter (which decreases every time he makes a sexist joke)) But no. You alternate between levels that are ridiculously easy and levels that are surprisingly tough.

Dewy's Adventure. Do not be fooled by the cute main character, the game will tear you apart if you mess around. Tons of bottomless pits, tough jumps, large groups of enemies, long levels and very low health pickups, and there are no checkpoints, meaning if you die once (Twice if you have the item which revives you when you die), you have to start the level all over again. Let us not even start on getting S ranks...

The Adventure Of Little Ralph seems very child-oriented - after all, it's got a child protagonist. The first few levels are hard, but still pretty standard, but from then on, the game turns Nintendo Hard. Hazards seemingly pop out of nowhere, catching the player by surprise, and the very last level is pure Platform Hell. It doesn't help that Ralph, the main character, is a One-Hit-Point Wonder.

Keen Dreams - compared to the other games it's less violent and has a less urgent plot. Your raygun is replaced by flower-power, seeds that temporary turn enemies into flowers. It is one the hardest one of the Commander Keen series. The fact that you cannot kill your enemies permanently forces you to be very careful with your ammunition and play as fast as possible to avoid the enemies regenerating. You must effectivly do a Speed Run and Pacifist Run at once. (Only Commander Keen 5 is harder dispite your weapon beeing lethal, but the tougher enemies are simply invulnerable.)

Super Meat Boy: The aesthetic is cute, but it's Ugly Cute, and the game will make you feel like a piece of meat that's been put through the grinder.

Freedom Planet is like this. It's a Sonic-inspired platformer with a girly art style and adorable characters. And it has very few Bottomless Pits, Collision Damage, or Mercy Invincibility, this should be a piece of cake! Wait, combat is a big chunk of gameplay? Well okay, simple enough. Wow the levels are pretty long, and why is the second boss so hard? What do you mean most enemies are spamming Bullet Hell attacks? Turns out the invincibility goes both ways, and the aforementioned Bullet Hell attacks will shave off most of your health if you're lucky. And that's without getting into the masochistic Hard Mode, where enemies deal double damage, shields break in one pop, and the bosses are faster and completely randomized their strategies. And playing as Milla gives you a very awkward combat style, with half the health of the other characters. Have fun!

Like the book that created it, the world of Green-sky in Below the Root seems pretty easy to manage at first. Then you find out just how difficult it is to jump some of those gaps between broken branches and what happens when you don't crawl across bridges you've made with your vine rope. You can spend a whole day — your day, not game day — trying to get up into the farheights of Skygrund.

The New Zealand Story is another cutesy Taito arcade platform game in the vein of Bubble Bobble or The Fairyland Story and starts off innocently enough... but then the levels become fiendish mazes full of Spikes of Doom, water areas that give you a very strict time before drowning and enemies that countinuously pour out of portals that can appear anywhere. The Mega Drive version, based on an earlier ROM build, is even harder.

For being an innocuous little game about bouncing cat heads, cat planet gets difficult when it introduces threats that can kill the protagonist. Especially in the last stretch, where you become sandwiched between crows and deadly spikes.

Despite being one of the games in the "Sega Club" line of games aimed at children under 12, Berenstain Bears Camping Adventure has relentless enemies and some tricky platforming. The game is even more difficult when set to the Grizzy Bear difficulty.

Action

The Super Star Wars games on the SNES. Like the Mario series, you may not expect these games to be easy, but these games ranked up there in difficulty with the Ninja Gaiden and Ghosts 'n Goblins series. The unpublished but leaked PC port is nowhere near as difficult.

To some extent, most of Treasure's output falls under this. With their whimsical art style and characters, you might not expect (for instance) Dynamite Headdy or Mischief Makers to be as hard as they are.

Noah's Ark, one of the few Bible games The Angry Video Game Nerd doesn't think outright sucks, is actually insanely difficult, despite its cutesy graphics and, well, status as a Bible game, especially chapter 4. Of course, it's made by the same people who made Contra. But pressing up up down down etc. on the title screen does nothing.

Battletoads, for the time. Now this game is famous for its difficulty alone, but back then, when the reputation wasn't so widespread yet, you didn't expect a game that had two cute frogs with ridiculously cartoony special moves and colorful stages to be hard.

Hmm, a third-person actioner/shooter/platformer called Darkened Skye. Involving Skittles, you say? Probably finish it in an hour. Wow, why am I dying so much? These jumps, especially involving those freakin' sinking lily pads, are HARD, and the enemies are really good shots! What, there are puzzles too?!

Flicky is about a cute mother bluebird trying to save her chicks from hungry cats and iguanas that want to eat them. The levels are only as big as the screen, and are very brightly colored. The chicks don't actually die if the aforementioned enemies get to them (unlike Zombies Ate My Neighbors)... but Flicky does if she touches a cat, and the cats like to ambush her. And the iguanas can run along any surface at about the same speed as Flicky can run. Flicky can't fly, only jump high. Your only defense are apples, telephones, cups, and other objects which Flicky can pick up by touching them and throw... but they use the same button as jumping. And there are only so many throwable objects per level. And due to the aforementioned issue you're likely to waste a lot of them while frantically guiding the chicks to the exit. And the cats and iguanas come back after about 7 seconds even if you do manage to kill them by throwing stuff at them.

Adventure

The first The Legend of Zelda game is surprisingly hard to anyone who came to the series by its sequels. You probably heard the second game is the hardest of the series, but the first game can be a surprise since its difficulty is not as discussed much.

Eiji Aonuma, who is one of THE most important people in the making of the Zelda series, has never beaten the first game.

While not as difficult as the original Metroid, those who went from the first Metroid Prime to Metroid Prime 2: Echoeswere shocked by an utterly unforgiving game with large worlds, few save points and some notoriously difficult boss fights such as The Boost Guardian, The Spiderball Guardian and others, and finally a second dimension that hurt Samus when she went into it. You fight almost all of the bosses in the Dark Aether dimension (which cuts 5 to 1 health every second), essentially turning every fight into a Time-Limit Boss if you can't manage to stay in a safe zone without getting shot. Some of the later fights had NO safe zones in the arena at all. Metroid Prime 2's boss battles are so legendarily difficult that apparently the testers used debug mode to beat the Boost Guardian. The game's difficulty was nerfed in the Metroid Prime Trilogy release.

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders looks like a simple adventure game set in the city, with a cheerful character and humorous premise. It quickly becomes apparent that almost nothing you do in this game makes sense in real life, and you have to try many ridiculous items to find something that works. If you don't pick up something before going somewhere it will be Lost Forever and you won't be able to progress when you need it. Not only that, but on occasion you're going against an (unseen) time limit which will send you back to earlier in the game if you don't succeed, and you can be trapped or killed quite easily...which means you have to load the game.

The Secret of Monkey Island is all fine and dandy until you have to procure a credit note (which requires memorising the turns of the shopkeeper's safe combination that correspond to 'push' and 'pulls'), which is one of the trickiest moments in a Monkey Island game, and thankfully, the only one of its kind.

ET The Extraterrestrial the reviled game for Atari 2600. Cute movie your kids liked, what could go wrong? Cue even adults ripping their hair out trying to get out of the pits.

Fighting

The first two Mortal Kombat games seem to be the best example - simple controls and limited movements...but insanely hard.

Tekken 2 is much harder than the other entries in the series, despite being the game where the series came into its own.

Tekken 3's Tekken Force Mode starts off as a relatively simple sidescrolling beat em up. This is until you get to Dr B, who you face after beating the mode four times. As you have one life in this mode, If you lose to him you have to complete the mode four more times in order to face him again. Luckily there is a way of getting around this by playing a certain number of matches in versus mode.

Tekken 6's Scenario Campaign mode gets frustratingly difficult in the later stages, specifically when you have to defeat four or five different bosses within the same level.

Super Monkey Ball features cute monkeys in hamster balls. It's also Nintendo Hard on Expert mode, especially the first game with its stages that force you to maneuver the ball across curved paths that's half as wide as the diameter of the ball. And on a timer that's never longer than 60 seconds per floor (level). And to get 100% Completion and unlock Master, you need to complete all of Expert (50 floors) and Expert Extra (10 more floors) without using a continue. In the first game, you also only get 3 lives (plus one for every 100 bananas you collect) before you have to continue.

Kula World. Roll a beachball to the end of a 2.5D level, jumping, avoiding enemies and collecting keys along the way. Seems simple enough. There are MANY levels (154) and they get harder as they go along. The fact you can only save every 5 levels doesn't help.

Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure looks like a kid-friendly adventure game that stars a young pirate and his pet monkey. It's actually an insanely tough puzzle game. Rues the parent who purchased this one for their six-year-old.

Lemmings. By the middle of the Taxing section your brain will ache. Mayhem will have you punching walls.

The sequel Oh No More Lemmings! is more of the same, even harder, and with a much sharper difficult curve (the levels suddenly jump from stupidly easy to stupidly hard and don't let up).

Lemmings 2. We have given you a hopper, two canoeists and a pole-vaulter. The exit is on the other side of a solid wall. Good luck.

The fan-created Portal: Prelude. Portal was fun and funny, and lots of people downloaded it out of love for the original game. What the developers didn't bother to mention was that it should have been named Portal: Makes Nintendo Hard Look Like A Cakewalk. There was so much outrage that the developer begrudgingly released a patch that makes the mod slightly easier. Despite continued requests to make the mod easier for everyone, he has said he will not reduce the difficulty anymore.

Trash Panic is a cartoonish game where you smash garbage off of other garbage to break it up so the bin doesn't fill up. Simple right? The demo's time limit (which doesn't do the game justice, btw) also makes it appear easy. However, actually finishing the levels is brutally hard; the garbage just keeps coming. You can burn garbage (bad for your Eco score), but if you burn or otherwise destroy valuable trash, your bin will overflow with penalty garbage. Not to mention the boss garbage, but even the Sweets (beginner) course which doesn't feature it is still pretty hard, even though the game has no limit on continues.

Shivers II: Harvest of Souls fits this trope more than Nintendo Hard, unlike its predecessor. Puzzles range from the dead simple "fit tiles into shape" puzzle, to the notorious "fixed moves you can make to match all colored marbles in their correct spots" puzzle in the Warehouse. There are more easier puzzles than harder ones, but I guarantee the "Solve Puzzle" feature will be used more than once on a first play.

Audiosurf is an interesting case. While you may be able to guess that some tracks will be hard when loaded up in the game, sometimes you get a nasty surprise thrown your way and what you thought would be an easy run turns out to be much harder than you thought it would be.

One weird example of something harder than expected is loading up a file of just white or pink noise. The game procedurally generates the level based on the rhythm of the music, but because white noise has little information to distinguish the 'easy' from the 'hard' parts of the song, the algorithm makes everything difficult.

Chip's Challenge: You'd think a game that looks like it was created in 10 minutes with MS Paint wouldn't be all that hard. Then you get past the tutorial levels, and just like that the game turns into the puzzle equivalent of Platform Hell. Fan-generated level packs are even worse, as they pulling off stunts that are usually considered illegal (like hiding traps and objects underneath floor tiles).

The obscure Playstation title The Bombing Islands. Most people would start laughing at the ridiculously cheesy theme song (not to mention that the player character is a freaking clown). Then about 10 levels into the game, watch and be amazed as that same laughter transforms into tears of agony.

The GBA puzzle game Denki Blocks! has very cute graphics, cute music, cute player characters and cute opponents. However, it's incredibly hard. As soon as you get past the third of eight opponents, you will fail. A lot.

A minigame in Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon called Bear Stormin' (which was recycled in a spinoff), which isnt too bad at first, but in the later levels, it gets filled with Nintendo Hard levels complete with the fact that all non-living objects are One Hitpoint Wonders. On top of that, you have to worry about your fuel, which if you run out, you lose flight unless you keep grabbing balloons. Later levels start you on a critical fuel situation, and they tease you by putting the balloons in annoying or impossible to reach places.

Angry Birds is a game where you fling cute birds into structures to topple them over and squash cute pigs inside. Good luck getting a three-star ranking, you'll need it.

Pushmo: Push blocks in and out to get to the top. It sounds simple but some puzzles are deviously hard.

Candy Crush Saga: A colorful little game about matching candies that starts off as so easy a kid can play it...and then progresses to more and more infuriating puzzles that seem to have been devised by Satan himself. Double-layered jelly and chocolate squares? The. Devil's. Work. This is because it's an Allegedly Free Game and the developers want you to spend money to advance.

This carries over to other games made by the same developers. For example, Farm Heroes Saga, a game with cute fruits and farm animals, also have way too many Luck Based Missions or levels with sadistically unreasonable goals that are nigh impossible to fulfill .

Dweep is a colorful, cute, non-violent game about an adorable furball. It also requires some seriously heavy-duty thinking—especially in the expansion pack levels.

Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor. Oh, it's a licensed game marketed to tweens, it must be pathetic...Wait, what's that noise? Did the walls just move? And why are there six doors out of the room? (takes another step) Oh, God, it's moving again! (looks back) Wait, that's not the door I entered through! Where the f*k am I supposed to go?!

The Nancy Drew games in general tend to invoke this trope. Other infamous game puzzles include a massive nonogram puzzle in Shadow at the Water's Edge and a deceptively frustrating game called Fox and Geese in White Wolf of Icicle Creek.

The Dr. Brain series is obviously full of challenging puzzles. Where this trope comes into play is when you change the difficulty level. A puzzle which was fairly straightforward on easy might become a bit harder but still a reasonable challenge when you turn the difficulty up to medium, or it might have you tearing your hair out in frustration.

For a specific example, the algebra microscope in The Island of Dr Brain is a piece of cake on easy, but is That One Puzzle on anything harder.

What's this Nyet III? ...oh, it looks like a harmless little Tetris clone with pre-made puzzles. I've done this kind of thing a hundred times, so this should be... wait, why are the blocks stopping in mid-air? Why do blocks keep popping in out of nowhere? Why are lines suddenly moving around on the screen? Why does it cost eighty in-game dollars just to freaking SAVE?! And this, my friends, is only the tip of this iceberg of madness, which is about the closest thing to Platform Hell that you'll ever find in a Tetris game.

RPG

The obscure game Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja for the Nintendo DS has bright, cartoonish graphics, a light-hearted comedy storyline, and simple controls...but it's also a Roguelike, and therefore completely merciless. Older gamers will take note of the fact that it's published by Atlus, who are pretty notorious for Nintendo Hard games. To show how far it goes; in most rpgs, you can Level Grind to beat anything. In Izuna, even at level 99 the final dungeon can be a nightmare. Compared to many other Roguelikes, this is pretty easy as the heroine maintains her levels even after being defeated. It does have a dungeon which drops your level to 1 and requires you to bring no items at the start of it for that old school feeling.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is similar - nice, kid-friendly license plus roguelike gameplay = at least it's merciful when you die, to the point of allowing for other players to rescue you like in most of the games labeled Mystery Dungeon.

Gaia Online's zOMG is meant to be a casual MMO, and so it's fairly easy for the first few zones. But by the time you enter the Zen Gardens zone the difficulty starts ramping up. Charge Orbs (EXP) and Rings (Skills) both randomly drop, only a few of the enemies in the game don't attack you on sight, and the game is designed in such a way that if you don't form a crew, you probably aren't going to last very long. (Admittedly, the game is still in the testing phases, so this is subject to change). Not to mention some of the instanced levels such as The Hive World, The Gauntlet, and The Shallow Sea scale based on your CL, so that an enemy will always be the same relative level to you. This includes the final boss. zOMG is a very fun game featuring a vibrant colorful world, high levels of character customization, and a fun story, and it's easy to pick up. But do not mistake this for an easy game you can breeze right through. If you want that Scarf of Asskicking, you've got to work for it!

It gets worse; the way the final boss used to work, if when your team of 6 got their asses handed to them, one could stay behind and keep the boss at its current health while the other five went back and restored their health and stamina. Then they were faced by the 107 missiles that the boss spawned while you were going through the run again. It wasn't really that good, since after three hours, people kind of had to leave to take a break from the last ten hours spent on the "casual" MMO. It wasn't really that effective, unless you were really fast, since the boss tended to restore health anyway, but at least you didn't have to start all the way over from the beginning of the boss fight...but wait, the new update changed it that if all six crew members are dazed, you're escorted out of the room! And this is all if your computer can handle Shallow Seas without lagging and dying, anyway. Given that you more than likely have to beat the first chapter to make it to the second chapter...people are going to be pissed.

In Kingdom Hearts I, you can get reamed on easy if you're not prepared for some bosses or are just hitting the attack button (specially in the case of Sephiroth in the first game, who is probably the hardest boss, but is available way before it can be reasonably expected to beat him). This is especially true in the early game where you can only stock like three potions and don't know Cure, so healing is limited. This continues in all the later games too.

Even if you're familiar with the series , Re: Chain of Memories can be this. It's mostly on on the level of II, making it easier then the original game...then you find out that almost all of the storyline bosses are worse than Xaldin.

II is considered to be easier than I. Even Sephiroth is debatably easier than in KHI counterpart. That is until you play the Final Mix version of the game, which offers a fourth difficulty setting that makes it possible to beat the entire game at level one. Even if you manage to beat the (even harder) Absent Silhouettes in the Bonus Dungeon and you think there's nothing else that could possibly top that, there's still Lingering Sentiment. Get this: At level 99, endgame Min-Maxing, the Decisive Pumpking or the Ultima Weapon, Normal/Easy mode and SecondChance; he will kill you if you don't know how to approach him. Not even Sephiroth was this extreme.

358/2 Days will offer to take pity on you by lowering the difficulty level if you continuely fail on a certain boss. Leechgrave in Halloween Town often requires such pity.

At this point, one has to wonder a little why people would still be fooled enough by the Disney logo to go into the game thinking it'd be easy.

The Dragon Quest series of RPGs have artwork by Akira Toriyama and a general Pokémon style look to the settings, but the games are regarded as some of the hardest JRPGs, though Dragon Quest V tends to be one of the easier installments (it's followed by the harder Dragon Quest VI, however). Remakes tend to tone down the difficulty a bit, though the games still stay challenging (just less so than the original versions).

Pokémon Yellow is significantly harder than the Red and Blue versions. All the Gym Leaders and rival battles have new, more powerful teams, and since you start out with Pikachu, the game takes a jump into the wilderness of Nintendo Hard when you find out that the first Gym Leader you have to face is Brock.

Brock was actually made weaker than in the originals. They also made several Pokemon that could easily roundhouse his team (such as Mankey) available early. There are also the male and female Nidoran. In this game, they earn Double Kick very early, so you can beat Brock with a Nidoran very easily. And they're found in the same place as Mankey. Then you come up to Misty (who as a water type leader should be weak to Pikachu) and find she is terrifyingly strong even with Pikachu.

Speaking of Pokemon, older players should remember Pokemon Stadium and its sequel, which were focused on battling hordes of AI trainers under some pretty fiendish conditions (such as using only baby Pokemon, randomly selected Pokemon, level limits, etc.). Round 1 in both games tended to be difficult as the player progressed and would require legitimate skill to beat, but most of it wasn't too bad. Round 2 bordered on Nintendo Hard, suffering from frustrating AI and the general feeling that it was pretty much made for the “Stop Having Fun” Guy sector of the fanbase.

The Stadium games were even worse if you didn't have a Transfer Pak to bring your Pokémon over from the Game Boy games and thus had to rely on the crappy rental Pokémon.

Diamond and Pearl seem to have an accidental case of difficulty. Due to the fact that Sinnoh's region dex had little variety, the Gym Leaders and Elite Four didn't had enough of their chosen type to actually fill a team, and the resulting loosely connected replacements (Playboy Bunny on the fire team? Sure it's "hot" but...) make them impossible to sweep with a single move like the past 3 generations.

Thankfully, much of this was fixed in Platinum. Extra mons were added to the Sinnoh dex, allowing the Gym leaders and Elite Four members to have teams consisting entirely of their type, in addition to allowing more variety in the player's team.

Not to mention, the updated movesets caught a lot of people off guard because they wouldn't expect almost every Pokémon available to have a move to use when fighting its weakness. Ah, using a Luxray on me? Well Torterra, I think it's time to use Earthqua-ICE FANG?! How'd you get that?!

Likewise, HeartGold and SoulSilver, with the added bonus of being Video Game Remakes and therefore most fans thinking they have a pretty good idea of the difficulty level to expect. They'd be wrong. The Gym Leaders actually employ advanced tactics (while not as bad as actual Sporepunch, Hypnosispunch still hurts), now have abilities that they put to good effect (you can no longer avoid Miltank's Stomp by using a Ghost-type as its ability lets it ignore Ghost's immunity to Normal-type moves), have teams with perfect IVs (Kanto even had its non-Gym trainers' levels raised because the whole region was otherwise a curb stomp), and the final boss now has even higher levels.

The simple matter of Houndoom getting one new move (Nasty Plot) in the generation shift made Elite Four Karen much, much harder than she was before, which often comes as a shock to players of the originals.

Pokémon Black and White actually surprised a few, but after Gen IV's Sequel Difficulty Spike we knew what to expect so the updated movesets didn't catch people off guard. Instead, it's the improved AI that uses more instances of Artificial Brilliance outside of important trainers. Even Pokémon Rangers (default trainer classes) use techniques such as baiting and switching.

The MOTHER trilogy looks simple and cartoony, but all three games have some serious difficulty. MOTHER consistently goes up in difficulty, although there's a couple of major spikes at Duncan's Factory (due mostly to its size) and Mt. Itoi (the enemies being way harder than anywhere else in the game). EarthBound, despite being much better than its predecessor, had random Difficulty Spikes throughout the game. MOTHER 3 finally settled for a consistent difficulty, and while the regular enemies aren't too bad, the bosses will mash you.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door definitely qualifies for this trope, despite everything looking like a cardboard cutout. While the first Paper Mario wasn't too difficult, provided you pay attention and learn the game mechanics, this game ramps up the difficulty quite a bit. Bosses having tons of HP and having at least one attack that can do massive damage to the party, being forced at one point to go alone when Doopliss steals Mario's body and his allies, and enemies inflicting nasty status ailments such as Freeze, Sleep, and Stop, which can end your game if you're not careful.

Similarily, the Mario & Luigi RPGs (except Superstar Saga) were pretty deceptive about their difficulty. They have bright, Mario-typical graphics, but the enemies and bosses can get very deadly if you don't master the battle-mechanics of dodging and countering attacks.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team takes this up even further. Oh, you thought this was going to be about the same difficulty as the last games? Nope, this one is much harder still (although you can go easy mode if you lose a fight). For example some attacks need to be dodged with the circle pad now and attacks can hit much harder. And the giant bosses? Not basically glorified cut scenes this time around, with the second or third giant boss of Dream Team being on par with the last two from Bowser's Inside Story.

For extra fun, try Hard Mode. No retrying fights, cap of ten on every item, shorter windows for action commands, and yes, the Giant Battles get harder too, to the point that the rematches in the late-game Battle Arena demand absolute perfection just to clear them.

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam drops the difficulty a little bit when compared to the previous game but it is still difficult. This is mostly due to the addition of a third character who unlike the two from the second game is completely independent of the two Mario Bros. and makes dodging attacks much harder, especially attacks that attack multiple characters.

The Neopets RPG, NeoQuest. You really wouldn't expect an RPG based on cute animals to be so difficult, especially since the first dungeon is so dissarmingly easy.

NeoQuest II's difficulty takes a turn for the nasty as you get closer and closer to Meridell Castle and Ramtor's Tower. And Meridell is the first world (of 5).

Undertale may look cutesy and the tagline is "The Friendly RPG Where Nobody has to Die", but don't let those elements fool you. Battles use bullet hell segments when you are attacked and the gimmicks ramp up in difficulty as you face off against the bosses.

Rhythm

HarmoKnight is meant to be a fun, happy game for the Nintendo 3DS. You'll swipe through each world with ease, but once you reach World 7 and World 8, you might even want to throw your 3DS out the window. (Don't think we like you, Final Trial!)

The difficulty of 9-key and 5-key have crept up over the years, but they're far from murderous, especially compared to IIDX's equivalents. EX, however, was made to kick butt and take names. Attempt it without lots of dedicated practice, and you get exactly what you deserve.

The "Toy Contemporary" boss song is quite un-boss-like, as well. It's basically a circus charge with kitten meowing thrown in.

Difficult doesn't cut it. The final level on easy is difficult, requiring at least three tries to do even somewhat well. The final level on hard difficulty will make your hand blur, your vision go fuzzy, and your loved ones begin thinking about staging an intervention. And Hard is about halfway up the difficulty levels.

We Cheer as well. Don't forget to calibrate the controls (some have), but even then, the game only goes easy on the first few songs.

Quite an obscure game, but there's Rhythm Heaven/Rhythm Paradise (or Rhythm Tengoku Gold). Think WarioWare, only all the (mini)games are rhythm songs. Seems easy huh? Wrong. Some of the games will prove to be pretty hard. Lucky for you you can skip them all if you want after three tries, and you'll pass most games after some practice. But now it gets hard, after you completed the game you can try to get everything gold (near-perfect) and after that (or during) you can try to perfect the games, but only if you get the chance and you only have three tries. Seriously, don't let the box-art or commercial fool you!

Obscure no longer in the US! It is still incredibly hard, especially since it will make fun of you frequently for failing. Oh, and the visuals never match the rhythm closely enough, so you MUST rely on the music or you will fail.

The game mechanics aren't any different from, say, the original Dance Dance Revolution (which is not on anyone's list of tortuously difficult games). The requirements, however, are INSANE. On some stages, getting as few as two misses results in a fail for the stage. Not a D grade, not some mild ridicule, absolute, abject failure. The remixes, in particular (which constantly switch up tasks without warning) will have you climbing walls.

Hottest Party still caught a few gamers off guard who thought they knew the series and didn't read the instructions. And even the instructions don't tell you exactly how you're supposed to swing the Wii Mote and trying to figure out what do do with your hands easily messes up your steps. Added gimmick steps didn't help either.

Songs by jun as of recent. Yes, Silver Dream may be a pretty happy song, until you realize that it's a level ten boss song on expert.

Disney DDR. Should be a cakewalk, right? Admittedly, the songs aren't that terrible, but some of them ("Nobody's Perfect" by Miley Cyrus comes to mind) seem to be a lot harder than you'd expect from a Disney-themed DDR game.

Some first-time players have a perception that, since DDR doesn't punish you for hitting an arrow when not prompted, that must mean you can get a "good enough" score by randomly stomping around not paying attention to the screen and are surprised when it doesn't work. The technical explanation for this is there is a large "Almost" timing window that triggers if you hit an arrow with poor timing; even if the arrow is hit again, the poorly-timed hit (which drains health) has already applied.

Guitar Hero. Not all the really hard songs have titles like "Raining Blood" or "Hangar 18". Some of the nastiest songs are innocent sounding names like "Jessica" or "Trogdor". Be especially wary when there is no bassline, only two guitars.

Karaoke Revolution (and Rock Band vocals by extension): many people mistake this for nothing more than a karaoke sim. What many of them don't realize is that the game will penalize you for "getting creative" with how you sing, and it's even possible to fail miserably on easy mode while playing a song you know (I've seen it happen) if you don't have a feel for how much you need to match the pitch.

Many pop songs in Nightmare Tier get this sort of reaction. "Good Vibrations" is a feel good surf rock song that makes you sing in a three octave range within a strange key amid bizarre lilting staccato-legato rhythm and almost no accompaniment. Then it slows down, makes you speak for a few measures, speeds up to a different speed and changes keys. Have fun!

Both Parappa The Rapper games. The characters and settings seem to be ripped straight out of a cartoon, along with the cheesy dialogue and aesops, but by the time you get past the halfway mark, just trying to stay with the rhythm of the buttons is hell.

Vib-Ribbon. Take Parappa's gameplay, and add in the "choose your own tunes" aspect of Audiosurf already mentioned. Therein lies the potential for some truly nightmarish levels. Did we mention that obstacles in Vib Ribbon tend to overlap when they scroll down the highway?

Ooh, Gitaroo Man! It has all the things we've come to expect from an iNiS game: an odd premise, some awesome music...and hand-crushing difficulty. This game will give you thumb cramps on the harder levels.

LEGO Rock Band. Just because it's family friendly doesn't mean it isn't difficult; while they tried to cherry-pick easier songs to an extent and lowered the thresholds of the difficulty tiers to compensate, the charting standards are no different from the original game, so the solos to, for example, "The Final Countdown" and "In Too Deep" don't hold anything back on the Expert difficulty. To take the point further, one achievement asks the player to get 100% on the former's guitar solo on Expert, which is many times harder than any of the achievements in Rock Band 2.

A song-specfic example: Sound Voltex gives us "Nyan Cat". In Sound Voltex II, it gets an Infinite chart. The chart is rated a 15, the highest difficulty rating in the game at the time of the chart's releasenote the maximum level has increased to 16 since.

Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure is made by the same people as Project DIVA but a lot more story-based. Its gameplay is similar to the (also very tough) Rhythm Heaven series, only you are not penalized for being slightly off. Yet, it is still ridiculously difficult, as the designers love putting in tempo changes, random gameplay switches mid-stage, visual cues that you barely have time to react to, and rather lengthy memorization sequences that you then have to do to the music's rhythm.

Aikatsu is easier than most examples above, but the game itself is not a cakewalk despite the cute characters and lighthearted premise, especially for fans who watched the anime adaptation first. The just-as-strict timing judgements and quick timing events will make careless players fail. It gets worse with Aikatsu Photo On Stage, its mobile game adaptation with gameplay and difficulty on par with Jubeat.

Racing

Mickey's Racing Adventure for the GBC. To fight a boss, you had to solve a sliding block puzzle with AT LEAST over one hundred moves required and a time limit. Add on rubberbanding and other cheating, the mixing of everybody's most hated game styles from the "flip around the track tiles while the train is on the track so it doesn't crash" to "dig up blade of grass to find coins" to Pac-Man converted into super mega hard mode with the possibility of crushing to attempting 3D tracks in 2D, endless MacGuffins, glitches, unavoidable obstacles, not even to mention some of the worst graphics and writing in any game. And this is supposed to be a kid's game.

Mario Kart in general falls under this trope. A racing game with bright and colorful graphics and a wacky cast of characters will lull players in a false sense of "This is so damn easy and childish" until they encounter the AI pulling the best items out of their ass time and time again to screw the player over or playing with people who are actually really good at the game and know how to use items effectively against others. The fact that much of it is Fake Difficulty due to Rubber Band AI turned Up to Eleven doesn't help.

Gran Turismo has license tests. National B and A can be challenging but the International C (Only on 2 and 5), B and A will give you a hard time. Super License will make you destroy your controller because it's not just a small part of the track, it's a full time trial. And God help you on 4...

Pretty much any mascot kart racer really. Crash Team Racing is no walk in the park. And it's fast.

Real Time Strategies

The bots in League of Legends. It's not uncommon to see people assume that since it's a bot game, they'll just dink around or that the other players wouldn't mind someone sabotaging the game. Except that only a few people seem to realize that bots are much better farmers than players are, it's impossible to stop them from farming, and that they receive items on a timer rather than having to actually buy them. So if you're stuck on a team full of players who prefer to just run laps around the map or play around thinking "Free win!", they'll wind up surprised when they're facing champions with thousands of HP and tons of armor on top of godlike reflexes, focus-firing skills, and crowd control.

Not to mention, if one doesn't entirely know what they're in for, they might be surprised on playing a champion to find that they're harder than they look.

Two words: Annie Bot. Here's a bot controlling a character whose entire playstyle is based on stunning you and offloading 3 high damage spells as fast as possible, with instant reflexes and impossible aim, and it gains free items that are always one step ahead of the player. Magic resist defeats this, but for the many players that don't want to sacrifice their damage to buy some defense, she is their worst nightmare.

Trundle Bot also manages to place that stupid environmental hazard in the worst possible spots.

Some players see a champion, either an ally who beats enemies up or are pummeled into oblivion by a champion (Usually a carry or assassin) and think they're easy. Then they realize that it's not that easy.

Note that this is usually because the champion seen has a very hard early and/or late phase (in exchange for an easy late and/or early phase), requires very specific items, requires lots of farm and/or enemy kills to get enough gold for their expensive items, requires very good map awareness and/or guesswork of enemy locations, requires very deep understanding of their skills and abilities or any combination of the above. It is quite easy to find first time users of such champions failing very, very hard.

Drow Ranger gets more damage if no enemy heroes are 400 units near of her. Considering there are alot of items to initiate and alot of heroes than can close the distance, this can be very hard to keep the distance. You can prevent that with a Shadow Blade of Blink Dagger, but dusts and sentries will spot you and Blink Dagger is immediately on cooldown for 3 seconds everytime an enemy hero hits you.

Real-Time Strategy games in general have a very common bit of Surprise Difficulty when players used to multiplayer jump into a game against AI bots. Not even counting explicitly coded "enhancements", game-controlled AI is able to multitask and micromanage in ways that no human could match. So, maybe the computer isn't coded to explicitly know the most efficient build to ramp up to the top-tier units and instead ends up spamming mid-tier units that are typically skipped because they're Awesome, but Impractical; then all of a sudden these things that are skipped because they need such fine-tuning that they distract you from other priorities perfectly synch up abilities and you end up with an entire army/team locked down, out of power or outright dead, and those impractical units go on to crush your base before you can rebuild.

Other

Rugrats: Royal Ransom on Reptar Tough difficulty is insanely hard at many points, to the point where it'd be hard to expect an adult to beat it easily, much less a small child.

Cooking Mama appears as a very cutesy easy game... that is until you try to get gold medals in every recipe. Midway through the game it becomes almost impossible, since you have to be PERFECT in every step and even missing the most insignificant part of a minigame results into a silver medal. There's also a good share of Fake Difficulty: play it too much and you'll get hungry!

The Pretty Cure games for the GBA are, well, Pretty Cure games, presumably expected to be played by little girls. The first one's a platforming Teamwork Puzzle Game, starting out mind-numbingly easy and getting more complex as a fairly reasonable rate...and it continues doing so way further than you might expect. And then, when you beat the game, you unlock another full set of levels as a "hard mode" of sorts, where the rise in difficulty continues almost-uninterrupted (level 51 is easy, as there's really no way they could have made level 1 hard). Somewhere in the seventies, you will begin to cry.

What makes this one (and its sequels, which are no easier) so difficult is that there's certain things that can only be gotten at certain points in the game. For example, in Amazon Trail II, if you don't happen to pick up the basket or mask at certain stops along the way, you're straight out of luck, as they are the only places they can be traded for.

In a non-children's version of this trope, the maker of the Avernum games got sick of people complaining that Torment mode was too easy. Well, Be Careful What You Wish For—as of the fifth game, on Torment a mere oversized wolf can have an HP of 4,000, with you lucky to deal 100 damage per hit.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Into the Inferno is meant to be played by two players controlling two characters. If you play it solo the battles are quite difficult as it's easy to be overwhelmed by enemies.

Katamari Forever is a brightly colored, cartoonish game that revolves around trying to roll up objects into giant balls, with an appropriately catchy J-Pop soundtrack to match. But there are some levels that will humiliate you repeatedly, such as the stage in which you have to achieve a certain temperature. To add insult to injury, the game characters themselves will snark on your poor performance!

The Katamari games tend to have a lot of That One Level. This goes back to the original Katamari Damacy with the Prince rolling up one bear and one cow. And a milk carton is a cow. A MILK CARTON!

Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby. It's Winnie the Pooh batting against his woodland friends... who throw incredibly fast, erratic, hard-to-hit balls. It's starting to be hailed as one of the toughest sports games ever.

Mighty Flip Champs! is simple enough in theory. Rescue all of the animals while traversing dimensions (flipping) that can be seen on both DS screens. Despite the only enemies being spikes and your own hand, it's still VERY easy to die continuously. And that's not even getting into getting S ranks.

Mighty Milky Way involves jumping/destroying and creating planets while trying your best to get from the start of a stage, to the exit portal. Death Is a Slap on the Wrist... for good reason. Starting in the middle of World 2, the "puzzle" part of the game shows its colors, and you'd better be prepared for precise placement and timing, lest you fail, die, and have to restart the stage...

Mighty Switch Force! involves catching prison escapees while switching between what platforms can and can't be used for standing, shooting, etc. Sounds and looks simple enough, but Surprise Difficulty kicks in once you start getting levels with fewer checkpoints, forced switching, less legroom to avoid enemies, cannon maze levels, or any combination of the four.

Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon features a minigame inside it known as Bear Stormin', which features you piloting a plane through an Auto-Scrolling Level. You have to keep your fuel up as high as you can by hitting balloons to regain some, while avoiding obstacles that take away some and objects that kill you in one hit. If you run out of fuel, you won't die instantly, but you won't be able to fly anymore. The first ten or so levels (of 47) aren't too terrible and are even the level of easiness you would expect in a kids' game, but the difficulty goes through the roof after that. Objects eventually start to fly in all directions, some fly the other direction, others change direction mid-flight, and some will just suddenly fly at you for no reason at all. Oh yeah, you only get three lives to make it through this too, which is painful because the later levels are long. Thankfully it is possible to save anywhere you want to, but if you really don't feel challenged enough, you can also try the recycled version in Putt-Putt & Fatty Bear's Activity Pack, which ups the ante even more. There are now 75 levels instead of 47, and no ability to save! You can skip by 16-level increments depending on which of the four difficulties you pick, but no continues otherwise. Seriously, when did they expect kids to make it through this?

Lovely Planet may look cheerful and has visuals often compared to Katamari Damacy, but it's also a challenging First-Person Shooter that requires good aim, reflexes, first-person platforming skills, and planning in order to clear levels.

The cartoony appearance of Kerbal Space Program, and the zany hijinks in many of the advertisements, can leave new players unprepared for the game's complicated controls and counterintuitive physics. Just getting into orbit around your home planet, a trivial task in most space games, is surprisingly difficult—an actual astronaut and engineer tried to do it with help from an experienced player, and still failed the first couple of times. Exploring the whole solar system is, needless to say, quite challenging.

Non-Video Games

The kids Game ShowKnightmare qualifies, especially in earlier years, having 8 winners across 8 seasons, and no winners in seasons 1 and 3. To be fair, it was based on a desire to be a televised version of a mid-80s fantasy RPG, and as such a bit of Nintendo Hard is to be expected...but to the point that there are still debates, by fans of the show who are now adults, as to what the correct solution to some of the challenges was? And riddles that required surprisingly in-depth knowledge of Arthurian legend?

Another kids Game Show; Eliminator. The Easy questions were your typical kids TV fare. Your Normal questions were hard for a kids gameshow, but not too bad since the kids got to choose what difficulty level of question to answer based on the category...the hard questions, on the other hand, would be considered at the very least tricky on an adult gameshow. Arguably justified by the fact the top prize was a Safari, and kids could quit before answering hard pointers (which became almost a requirement to stay in the game), but to the point that adult gameshow fans have stated that they would only go for hard in categories they're extremely strong (...And, at that, reluctantly) in unless they absolutely have to - assuming they were on an adult adaptation of the show that kept the same (non-relative) question difficulty?

Another one was the Jester's Court - that wasn't a very fair task, because you could see people having an easy time with it, but that was because they had to hit all the buttons at once; and that wasn't easy if you were short.

The final round ("Let's go to the map!") on Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? actually had its difficulty ramped up as the show ran on, because too many kids were winning and PBS couldn't afford to keep paying for trips. Seven countries in 45 seconds, not too bad. Eight cities or bodies of water in 45 seconds? Considerably worse. Not to mention that the map tended to be someplace unfamiliar to American audiences like Africa, and it was upside-down from the contestant's perspective.

Don't forget that the contestant had to wait until the host completed reading his question before running over to the proper location. Often, these were long questions, and even if he read them fast they took upwards of 5 seconds to finish. Thus, there were many instances in which a contestant was very fast and perfect about each location, but still lost because the host took too long in his part. Often, the bonus round was humanly impossible to complete.

Although they took the long readings out after a season or two. Eventually he would just say "Carmen went to Zaire".

The final round of the spinoff, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, was even worse. The final mission was "The Trail of Time." Roughly, the kids had to run from one gate to the next, answering questions or performing a small but time-consuming task (turn a wheel, pull a rope.) The questions were long (albeit rather simple, usually a two-choice multiple choice.) But the tasks were time consuming and, probably the worst offender, the gates were not in order, rather just jumbled around. Even with the Engine Crew waving with airport flashlights, kids kept going to the wrong gates.

This was the entire point of the show Trapped. In each challenge, the contestants (known as Unfortunates) would attempt to complete a simple challenge, such as assembling a wall or filling a goblet with snow. However, in each round, a saboteur was chosen from among the remaining Unfortunates in secret with their goal being to mess with the challenge in some way, such as knocking down the tower when a blackout strikes or purposefully stepping on the ground to tip the goblet over. It's no surprise that some challenges were never beaten during the run of the show, especially in the two examples mentioned as they didn't end when the task was completed (instead, they had to be complete when the timer ran out).

However, being a saboteur wasn't as easy as it sounds; they had to make sure the challenge was failed without the team realising who the saboteur was. If the team beat a challenge or if the saboteur was spotted, they were eliminated from the game (the same would happen to another Unfortunate if the saboteur succeeded at both of these).

Teams on The Amazing Race, even those who have been fans of the series for years, have finished the first leg in shock of how difficult the Race actually is. This could be in part that, while very little of the travel portions are shown on TV, teams can sometimes spend hours looking for flights to their next destination, and all the sitting around and waiting doesn't help either.

National spelling bees.They're spelling bees. For kids. The contestants are all middle-schoolers. Wait, is... is that word even English? Is it even a word? Holy shit, did that thirteen-year-old kid actually get it right?!

The movie Spellbound and the book American Bee both establish just how much training it takes to get far in those things. Essentially, you have to develop monomania for words.

Katamino and its derivatives. Look at those colorful pentominos. Now try to form a 5x9 rectangle with them.

Pretty much any Quiz and Stunt Game Show. Most think it can be a walk in the park to easily beat something you can trounce through easily with your skill and knowledge. It isn't, especially if they give out big money, especially in front of millions of viewers, and especially if those millions of viewers could put you in an Epic Fail montage if you fail horribly. Naturally, these kinds of shows are made to be as difficult as possible so that the show doesn't have to constantly pay out the nose for prizes won every single day.

When you watch Survivor on TV, it looks somewhat easy for what they're doing. I mean, a kid can do this, right? Well, when you watch it on the TV, you're well fed, well rested, see what's going on in the other camp, etc.

The Price Is Right catches many people off guard when they become contestants on the show. People tend to think the show is easy (probably because they can easily look up prices of products through Google as the show is playing on TV) and how they would never make the same stupid mistakes people on the show do. It isn't until you get to actually play the games on the show that you are under the pressure of guessing the general price range of a car with a limited amount of chances or trying to correctly guess the prices of four prizes in a strict time limit while running around on stage with the price tags in your hands. The more focused contestants tend to do better than the ones who let their excitement take control.

Wipeout (2008) and Takeshi's Castle. It looks really fun... but damn are they hard! These obstacle courses take a lot more stamina and luck than one thinks.

Password Plus. As lampshaded by Ludden, it's harder than it looks. Because you see the word written right in front of you, many people accidentally read the word by mistake.

Fast Money in Family Feud. Sure you can't help but laugh or facepalm when someone says a stupid answer to a question with an obvious number one answer. But when you actually play for yourself, you realize you only get four seconds per question. The tight time constraint can really make it hard to focus and come up with logical answers.

Dave Barry once said that synchronized swimming is the easiest sport in the world. After being invited to a swim meet with them, he said that it was the hardest sport in the world.

Open-book tests can be merciless if you're not prepared. Some are designed so there isn't enough time to skim notes and books for all the answers, while some compensate for the available notes by being so advanced or indepth that even with them it's hard. Also, go ahead and ask a trademan how easy tests involving the National Building or Electrical Code can be, where finding some of the obscure or oddly worded code references can be downright brutal.

In-universe example in the Sonic Boom episode, "Fuzzy Puppy Buddies"; The Fuzzy Puppies board game is implied to be a lot more sophisticated and difficult to learn than the name and theme suggest. The playing pieces are adorable puppy figures that each have their own unique ability, they can be equipped with cute hats that also bestow different abilities, you need to have a balance of enforcers, decoys, and support puppies on your team to play it well, the playing board is a hex-grid, and a 20-sided die is involved.

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